Entertainment

Will One WikiLeaks Supporter Drop Her Case Over Twitter Account Info?

Icelandic Parliament Member Birgitta Jonsdottir said she will make an announcement this Friday about her fight with the United States Department of Justice that requested her Twitter account information for its investigation into WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

"I have excellent team of lawyers from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and ACLU representing me pro-bono," Jonsdottir said. "I couldn't have been represented by a greater team of experts."

She wouldn't elaborate exactly what she would be announcing, but Jonsdottir doesn't shy away from the fact she was involved with Wikileaks — a connection that the Department of Justice is likely investigating. Jonsdottir helped produce the now infamous documentary, Collateral Murder.

"I did not only support WikiLeaks in this but co-produced it (the video)," Jonsdottir said, adding that she was also "a spokesperson," for the video.

"I put a lot of work and effort into making this video possible to be published and am very proud of it," she added.

On Jonsdottir's blog she thanked the United States government for requesting her personal information, adding, "It has raised my awareness about the lack of civic rights social media users have and thus given me reasons to fight for these rights.

"Very few of us had the imagination that governments that claim to be democratic would invade our online privacy with no regard to rights we are supposed to have in the real world," she wrote in the post.

In addition to Jonsdottir's Twitter account information, the Department of Justice also requested Twitter information for two other individuals with suspected ties to WikiLeaks.

At the bottom of Jonsdottir's email is this saying attributed to Nelson Mandela: "When those in power deny you of freedom the only path to freedom is power." Perhaps Jonsdottir will continue to fight the United States government and its request to access private information? Or maybe this will be the end of the road for her case and she'll use this experience to fight for social media privacy.

Twitter's policy is to hand over information to law enforcement if it is issued a subpoena, but Twitter will, it says, always inform the user first, unless the company is given another order to keep it secret. When Twitter first received the order to hand over information for the three accounts, plus a gag order, Twitter took the United States Department of Justice to court and informed the three account holders of the subpoena, giving them time to fight the order themselves.

The amount of information the United States government requested is quite extensive. It wants access to all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the means and source of payment, including banking records and credit cards.

What is your take on this case? What do you think Birgitta Jonsdottir should do? Sound off in the comments.

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